with the scenery and machinery of divine interpositions, the more apt, I am convinced, it will be to take your imagination. For this reason, the poet would be your best apostle, or prophet; and the word vates might serve you, as it did the old Romans, to represent him in both capacities.

Shep. By the words, divine revelation,' strictly taken, we understand only such religious informations as we could not possibly, or, at least, not without the greatest difficulty, come to the knowledge of by the mere force of our own natural faculties; or, in the lowest sense, we mean, by them, the discovery of such religious truths as mankind in general were actually ignorant of before that discovery was made, whether we suppose the cause of their ignorance to have been neglect, or incapacity. Concerning the incapacity of mankind to find out the true religion, we have said enough, already, for our present purpose; but, as to the neglect of those means which nature alone hath afforded them, in order to this important end, if such there are, it hath been so great and universal, as to make instruction not a whit less necessary, than it would have been, had human nature the benefit of no such means. This must, I think, be acknowledged by those who look on Deism to be the true religion, if they consider how few Deists there are in the world, and how long it was before Deism made its appearance. If we are, therefore, so apt to shut our eyes to the light of nature, we certainly stand in need of somewhat foreign to nature, or above it, to teach us what we will not receive from nature. If such positive institutions, as the sabbath, the sacraments, and a ministry to instruct us, may be highly conducive to this end, the necessity of divine interposition, without which the aforesaid means cannot be effectually insti tuted, must be granted. It was the noble sentiment of Plato, that 'every dependent nature must be governed by a superior nature;' and, from a thorough knowledge of mankind, he concluded, that they must be governed by the Divine Being.' If, therefore, man is enslaved to wickedness by the corruption of his nature, it is not enough that he knows the law of God, which, of himself, he is unable to observe; he must, in order to a due observance of that law, have some assistance from God, sufficient to counterbalance the prevalence of his natural corruption, and make him free. As the

blindness of human understanding requires divine instruction, so the perversity of human will stands in absolute need of divine grace, to bend it back again from its inclination to vice, and set it upright. To deny this latter, is to deny that the passions and appetites have a powerful influence on the will, or that they themselves are corrupt and violent; both of which are, I think, too evident, to be disputed; for all the sins of those who believe in God, and know his law, are a full proof of both, since they shew, that a bare knowledge of God, and his will, are not enough to keep us in our duty, which they fail to do in us all, in proportion as the grace of God is wanted, or resisted. Thus, gentlemen, the assistance, required to make us good and happy, is not only scientifical but practical.

Dech. And so all the good we do, and for which we hope to be rewarded with the joys of heaven, must be done, not by ourselves, but by God. This, I think, is childish.

Temp. I believe you do not understand Mr. Shepherd. He only says, the assistance of God is necessary to counterbalance the corrupt bias in our nature to wickedness, in order to make us free agents; after which, the good we do, is, in some measure, our own, being the effect of a free choice, and therefore may be rewarded.'

Shep. You do me justice. To sum and illustrate what hath passed on this latter topic; the book of nature contains the science of divine things; but without instruction we cannot, in the blindness of our present condition, rightly understand its language and characters; after we are taught to understand them, we cannot, without powerful inducements, be prevailed on to peruse and study the contents of that book; and, after we have perused it, we are unable to apply the knowledge, we gather from it, to practice, till the impediments, arising from the corruption of our nature, are removed, or balanced, by divine assistance.

Dech. And when the utmost lights, reason can give us from the book of nature, are attained to, still a second volume is wanting, to teach us mysterious and preternatural religion. It is now near three, so that there is hardly sufficient time left to dress.

DIALOGUE IV.

DECHAINE, TEMPLETON, CUNNINGHAM, SHEPHERD.

Temp. SINCE we finished our yesterday's conference, I have been trying to recollect what passed, and to extract from it a settled system of thinking on religious subjects, that may serve me during my whole life. But whether it is that my memory fails me, or that my former high opinion of the natural light still retains a corner of my assent, and from thence batters whatever I attempt to build, I am still considerably embarrassed.

Shep. This is natural. It shews a sensible and ingenuous mind to preserve a mean between too lightly divorcing a former system, and too obstinately declining the espousal of a new one. But, while two opposite principles, at the head of their respective arguments, contend for preference, while the mind, in respect to the decline of former opinions, and the growth of new ones, is as it were moulting, there is a struggle, a disorder, felt in an honest and rational breast, which others are strangers to, who either, through a too easy wantonness of mind, know not how to be chaste to any principle, or through a stupid immobility, remain for ever riveted to their first attachments, although contracted without examination, and, consequently, without sufficient reason or grounds. Your present uneasiness, however, will vanish as soon as it ought, I mean, as soon as the arguments on one side so far preponderate, as to make this yet necessary wariness no longer useful. What Mr. Dechaine said the other day, will hasten the resettlement of your thoughts.

Dech. What, a compliment from Mr. Shepherd!

Shep. A little patience, sir. You said something to this effect; that, as the ends of religion are of more importance to us than the use of our outward senses, the ideas it gives us of God and our duty, ought, if possible, to be more clear and determinate to our reason, than the distinction between colours to our eye. And, indeed, I must confess, if nature were the only canal through which God intended to convey the absolutely necessary knowledge of himself, and all human

duties, its voice would have been made a little louder, and more intelligible, to all men, and all capacities, than we find it is it must, perhaps, as you have frequently insisted, be so plain, that there could be no controversy about it. Hunger, thirst, love, fear, and other natural motions, are universally strong and evident in all men. Were religious and moral obligations notified to us by our Maker, only through the light of nature, they too would by nature, one should think, be universally evident and incontestable. Yet we find the wisest unassisted men, in all ages, have differed widely about them; and those who trusted most to their own abilities, who rejected traditionary knowledge, and drew all from within themselves, have given the most absurd schemes of religion and morality. If a man were disposed to shut his eyes against all other lights but the natural, and put himself on the mere dictates of philosophy, shall he trust only to his own sentiments and reason? If he does, let him first give back all he hath got by instruction and conversation, by reading, by business, by the laws of his country, &c. and then let us see what his unassisted nature will be able to produce. If he finds it defective, we will allow him all the ancient and modern philosophers, who yet draw the first principles and hints of all they have delivered to the world from instruction, and let him try if he can exact a right system of obligation and duty from their lucubrations. Will he join himself to the Stoics? No, nature refutes their doctrine of apathy, and places a wide difference between pleasure and pain its infirmities makes their pretensions to infallibility and perfection ridiculous. Shall he herd with the Epicureans? If he does, as religion will be wholly out of the question, and pleasure the only good, he must quit society, which can have no other foundation but religion, and make one among goats or swine, as Horace styles himself, while an Epicurean. But as it is extremely slavish and disagreeable to be wedded to any set of principles, the Pyrrhonian philosophy will relieve him from their ridiculous notions, and also from the endless refinements of the Athenian, Cyreniac, and other schools. But what sort of a father, husband, neighbour, or commonwealth's-man is he to be, who hath no opinions, no principles? Is he, as to matters of religion, to take up with the theology of Egypt, Greece,

Rome, or any other country that contrived a religion, and made gods for itself? No, this will set him on his knees to a parricide, an adultress, a drunkard, a dog, an onion, a wooden, a rotten god, or a devil. Can Socrates or Plato relieve him, and dictate a right religion to him? No, they confess the necessity of revelation. If such men as these are unable to instruct him sufficiently in his duty, and bind it on his conscience with motives and authorities so cogent and awful, as to keep the corrupt tendencies and wild sallies of his nature within due bounds, much less will Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Plutarch, Hierocles, &c. be able to do it; for they only build on the old philosophers, already found insufficient and, besides, if in any thing they come nearer to reason, it is evidently owing to the Christian religion, as the reformation of Paganism made by Julian. If he hopes for information from either the religion or philosophy of the ancient Pagan world, he will find himself as much disappointed and out of humour with both, as Lucian was; and if he is of a ludicrous turn, as ready to make a jest of both. If he applies himself to our English philosophers, he will find the greater part of them declaring and arguing strenuously for revelation at one time, and at another, advancing, and endeavouring to maintain, particular schemes of their own, consistent neither with revelation, nor one another. As to the rest, who declare for Deism, he will perceive they borrow all their materials from the former; adopt their inconsistencies; speak for and against revelation, and future rewards and punishments; for and against innate ideas of God, and moral duty; for and against the being of immaterial substances; make the knowledge and obligation of moral duties to arise, some from an internal sense, with Cumberland and Hutcheson; others, from reason, and the fitnesses of things, with Clarke and Balguy; others, from the laws of society, as Hobbes and his followers, who have not even a pretender to Christianity for a precedent. He will find them dealing artfully and doubly in every thing; and, what renders them most unfit for his purposes, referring him entirely to himself, and bantering him with repeated assurances, that he already knows all those matters perfectly weH, about which he is seeking with so much solicitude for satisfaction.

Dech. This referring of a man to himself, you may dress